1 Everyday Politics, Social Practices and Movement Networks: Daily Life in Barcelona’s Social Centres 1 Word count: 9, 585 Last checked: 22/7/14 Abstract: The relations between everyday life and political participation are of interest for much contemporary social science. Yet studies of social movement protest still pay disproportionate attention to moments of mobilization, and to movements with clear organizational boundaries, tactics and goals. Exceptions have explored collective identity, ‘free spaces’ and prefigurative politics, but such processes are framed as important only in accounting for movements in abeyance, or in explaining movement persistence. This article focuses on the social practices taking place in and around social movement spaces, showing that political meanings, knowledge and alternative forms of social organization are continually being developed and cultivated. Social centres in Barcelona, Spain, autonomous political spaces hosting cultural and educational events, protest campaigns and alternative living arrangements, are used as empirical case studies. Daily practices of food provisioning, distributing space and dividing labour are politicized and politicizing as they unfold and develop over time and through diverse networks around social centres. Following Melucci, such latent processes set the conditions for social movements and mobilization to occur. However, they not only underpin mobilization, but are themselves politically expressive and prefigurative, with multiple layers of latency and visibility identifiable in performances of practices. The variety of political forms – adversarial, expressive, theoretical, and routinized everyday practices, allow diverse identities, materialities and meanings to overlap in movement spaces, and help explain networks of mutual support between loosely knit networks of activists and non-activists. An approach which focuses on practices and networks rather than mobilization and collective actors, it is argued, helps show how everyday life and political protest are mutually constitutive. Keywords: social movements; theories of practice; everyday life; social centres; political protest; Barcelona
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Everyday Politics, Social Practices and Movement Networks:
Daily Li fe in Barcelona’s Social Centres1
Word count: 9, 585
Last checked: 22/7/14
Abstract: The relations between everyday life and political participation are of interest for much
contemporary social science. Yet studies of social movement protest still pay disproportionate attention to
moments of mobilization, and to movements with clear organizational boundaries, tactics and goals.
Exceptions have explored collective identity, ‘free spaces’ and prefigurative politics, but such processes are
framed as important only in accounting for movements in abeyance, or in explaining movement persistence.
This article focuses on the social practices taking place in and around social movement spaces, showing
that political meanings, knowledge and alternative forms of social organization are continually being
developed and cultivated. Social centres in Barcelona, Spain, autonomous political spaces hosting cultural
and educational events, protest campaigns and alternative living arrangements, are used as empirical case
studies. Daily practices of food provisioning, distributing space and dividing labour are politicized and
politicizing as they unfold and develop over time and through diverse networks around social centres.
Following Melucci, such latent processes set the conditions for social movements and mobilization to
occur. However, they not only underpin mobilization, but are themselves politically expressive and
prefigurative, with multiple layers of latency and visibility identifiable in performances of practices. The
variety of political forms – adversarial, expressive, theoretical, and routinized everyday practices, allow
diverse identities, materialities and meanings to overlap in movement spaces, and help explain networks of
mutual support between loosely knit networks of activists and non-activists. An approach which focuses on
practices and networks rather than mobilization and collective actors, it is argued, helps show how
everyday life and political protest are mutually constitutive.
Keywords: social movements; theories of practice; everyday life; social centres; political protest;
Barcelona
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Introduction
The relation of political participation with everyday life is currently controversial. Some political scientists
have identified declines in certain types of participation, while others have highlighted generational shifts
towards ‘post-materialist’ values, identity politics and the environment (Inglehart 1997; Norris 1999). The
debate has spurred increased analysis into ‘newer’ forms of political action, recently most obvious in
studies of consumer activism such as boycotting and buycotting (Jacobsen and Dulsrud 2007) and internet-
mediated participation and networking (Castells 2007; Juris 2008; Chadwick and Howard 2009).
Meanwhile, in arguments claiming a rise of individualization and decline in the relevance of certain social
classifications such as class, social theorists such as Giddens (1991) and Beck (1992) elaborated concepts
of emergent political forms where a moral disposition towards politics – as an instrument of social change –
is located in processes of identification and self-realization. However, these theories tend to subsume
political engagement in an account of social change which is relatively uninterested in collective action.
Activists, and scholars of social movements, meanwhile, increasingly identified the realm of
everyday life as politically significant from the 1960s onwards, particularly for feminism,
environmentalism, the peace movement and queer politics (Hanisch 1978; Habermas 1981; Offe 1985;
Melucci 1985, 1996). This trend has continued beyond the proliferation of ‘new’ social movement theories.
Compared with the labour movement or with institutionalized pressure groups, many of these social
movements have different types of goals, targets, and tactics. Goals are multi-layered and are less focused
on legislative change or a redistribution of resources, more on establishing more equal, peaceful,
ecologically benign societies. Targets and adversaries are often cultural or more diffuse than national elites,
with corporations and international governance bodies more frequently targeted. Repertoires of protest
remain diverse, but are more likely to include direct action, prefiguration, the use of temporary protest
spaces or institutions, and other forms of ‘everyday’ politics. These diffuse goals and targets, and
unconventional styles of protest, make moments of political protest or contestation, and the very definition
of social movements and their boundaries – difficult to sustain empirically. Although there have been
moves to demonstrate ‘even newer’ historical turns in the development of social movements, particularly
with the marked decline in identity politics, the abovementioned trends identified since the 1980s remain
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important in contemporary collective action (Buechler 2000; Haenfler, Johnson and Jones 2012). In
remaining a collection of theories and empirical work about collective action, however, social movement
studies has retained a perhaps inevitable bias towards adversarial social movement mobilization and highly
visible social conflict, meaning analysis of the everyday has been tentative and contingent.
This paper examines how political meaning and ideology underpin everyday practices in social
movement networks, and explores the implications for theories of protest and daily life. Social centres,
spaces where alternative living arrangements, social and educational events and political campaigns are
hosted, are used here as case studies to anchor an analysis of practices of daily life and political action in
Barcelona’s social movement and youth cultural communities. Practices are understood as composed of
several interconnected elements focused on social actions and understandings, or following Andreas
Reckwitz (2002: 250), as 'routinized way[s] in which bodies are moved, objects are handled, subjects are
treated, things are described and the world is understood'. Practices carried out in social centres demonstrate
how the testing, expression and prefiguration of political meaning takes place in the course of everyday life,
not just in periods of low movement activity or ‘abeyance’.
All practices in social centres have various explicit purposes, and the provisioning of food, the
organizing and distribution of space, and the dividing of labour are the examples used here. Yet practices
simultaneously stage enactments of values and politicized identity. They contribute towards the small-scale
achievement, or prefiguration (Graeber 2002; Maeckelbergh 2009, Yates 2014), of certain overarching
goals: attempts at decommodifying exchange; sharing resources and knowledge; and establishing
egalitarianism in domestic work and decision-making. The practices described are also politicizing, as the
organization of social events initiate collective performances of practices, and the sharing of associated
knowledge and competence among participants relating to the pursuit of social change. Diverse networks of
people are connected and politicized through the variety of activities taking place in centres, less often
united by any clear or continuous collective identity, but through common understandings and compatible
types of performances of these social practices. Thus, networks are deliberately stimulated through the
organized events and quotidian socializing that take place in and around social centres, as well as in
communicative or adversarial protest such as demonstrations and direct action.
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Examining everyday practices in this way extends understanding of how latent processes work in
social movements (Melucci 1996). According to Verta Taylor (1989) and Suzanne Staggenborg (1998),
such processes maintain networks and oppositional identities between protest cycles, as activities during
periods of abeyance. This creates opportunities for collective action that map onto those of the political
system (Staggenborg 1998). Building on these insights, I argue that everyday practices can develop and
establish relationships of cooperation, learning and a culture of experimentation with political ideas about
everyday life in their own right. These processes allow different types of social groupings to coalesce and
derive group solidarity, share skills and understandings, and they help explain recruitment and rapid
mobilization beyond activist cadres. In this way, they are also illustrative of the relationship between
subcultural groupings and social movements, requiring a conceptual vocabulary which does not reify
collectives and movements, but is sensitive to the various overlapping forms of connections on the basis of
shared ideas and practices.
Perspectives on everyday life and political protest
Latency, abeyance and moments of protest
Notions of abeyance, latency and social movement community built on new social movement theories and
other contemporaneous developments, to clarify the type of relations existing between cultural and political
processes in movements, and those between movements and wider society (Taylor 1989; Melucci 1996;
Staggenborg 1998, Staggenborg and Taylor 2005). However, this work came from analysis of movements
between protest cycles, showing that networks and activities persist when movements are not mobilizing,
but rarely generalizing beyond these moments of ‘abeyance’ (Taylor 1989). Networks of activists and
repertoires of protest are sustained over periods of relative inactivity and limited opportunity through
affective bonds, cultural activities and ‘free’ spaces (Evans and Boyte 1986, Taylor 1989, Futrell and Simi
2004). Yet the concept of abeyance, and the associated findings about what movements do when they are
not mobilizing, has been limited to explaining the persistence of social movements where political
opportunities are scarce. ‘The abeyance process functions through organizations capable of sustaining
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collective challenges under circumstances unfavourable to mass mobilization’ (Taylor 1989: 765).
Similarly, Suzanne Staggenborg’s (1998) work on movement communities conceives of movements
regularly interacting in wider cultural groupings, which helps ‘in analysing both how movements emerge
within cycles of protest and how some movements maintain themselves beyond the decline of a protest
cycle’ (1998: 181). Although Staggenborg emphasizes the diffuse boundaries between subcultural
expression and activism, her aim is principally to show how communities provide a primary context for
opportunities and constraints for mobilization which maps onto the wider political context. Theories which
acknowledge cultural practices, mutual learning and identification processes in social movements’ day-to-
day existence create alternative ways of doing things, build support for movements and their ideas, and
forge alliances between groups. In other words, these processes have implications for socio-cultural change
which do not feed directly into movements and their direct struggles in a landscape of political
opportunities and constraints.
Alberto Melucci (1985, 1996) placed greater emphasis on the role of everyday processes of
networking, learning and the construction of meaning in social movements. For Melucci, these processes
are not simply about movements in abeyance. Rather, latent movement activity (what goes on within
movements) and visible movement activity (more or less mobilization) are mutually constitutive:
The molecular change brought about by the hidden structure should not be seen as a ‘private’ and
residual fact, but a condition for possible mobilization (1996: 116).
The relation of latency and visibility in movements runs throughout Melucci’s work, but he is at his most
categorical in the 1985 article ‘The Symbolic Challenge of Contemporary Movements’.
These two poles, visibility and latency, are reciprocally correlated. Latency allows visibility in that
it feeds the former with solidarity resources and with a cultural framework for mobilization.
Visibility reinforces submerged networks. It provides energies to renew solidarity, facilitates
creation of new groups and recruitment of new militants attracted by public mobilization who then
flow into the submerged network. (1985: 801)
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Melucci also frequently refers to latency and visibility as two ‘poles’ between which movements oscillate
(1996: 130, 174), but implies elsewhere that they may take place simultaneously due to the blurring
between public and private, and between individual identity and collective action (1996: 115). He does not
explicitly discuss how there might be other forms of visibility to public mobilization, or how latent
processes might themselves become a focus of overt political attention.
These accounts offer a variety of insights towards building micro-sociological understanding of
everyday life in social movements. Complementing this, work on social movement spaces shows how
movements ‘prefigure’ movement goals in everyday practices (see Polletta 1999). Yet similarly to
arguments about abeyance, the emphasis is on the role that spaces and visions of ‘alternatives’ have in
social movement ‘persistence’, as though they were important to movements only during periods of
quiescence (Polletta 1999; Futrell and Simi 2004; Glass 2010). Work on prefiguration, particularly in
studies of the alter-globalization movement, shows that the way in which political action is planned and
undertaken, even in everyday life, is important both in producing inspiring and/or feasible alternative
societies, and in distinguishing groups from authoritarian and hierarchical forms of left-wing political
organization (Graeber 2002; Maeckelbergh 2009). Marianne Maeckelbergh’s (2009) account, for example,
shows how a variety of goals are managed simultaneously in social movements, with an overlapping range
of strategic priorities and goals. However, her analysis is typical in focusing on decision-making and the
actual planning of protest. This over-emphasizes rationality, downplays habit and identity, and continues to
treat activities outside of political protest and its planning as somewhat irrelevant.
Literature on social movements, therefore, even that ostensibly focused on ‘identity’ and ‘culture’,
still implies that everyday processes are only important when there is nothing else to look at. Rather than
showing how protest is socially contextualized, it simply negotiates for a small additional set of everyday
moments or cultural groupings to be taken account of. The occasional exceptions to this rule, however, are
encouraging. Staggenborg and Taylor’s (2005) article on the ruddy health of the women’s movement
recommends a move beyond the ‘contentious politics’ paradigm. It argues for the necessity to think of the
women’s movement not in terms of ‘waves’, but to acknowledge that visibility does not always correlate
simplistically with activity. This is evidenced by a demonstration of the ongoing vitality of feminist groups
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in North America simultaneously organizing and negotiating in social institutions, and in subcultural
groupings and spaces. Increasing awareness of, and interest in movements focusing on ‘lifestyle
movements’ and (anti-)consumption are also valuable reminders of the sub- and micro-political activities at
the peripheries of social movements (Haenfler, Johnson and Jones 2012). Until very recently, most
accounts have downplayed the dynamism and connections between different movement organizations, and
between movements and other collective identifications (Portwood-Stacer 2012).
This article seeks to address these problems, with an account of how political ideas and discourses
are associated with and performed through practices in social movement spaces. Interactions between
diverse groups in sharing practices and space allow political ideas to be articulated and tested in ‘latent’
social movement processes, with their own patterning of latency and visibility internal to the social
movement and youth cultural communities. These everyday politicized practices can be carried out by
individuals or collectives as part of their political trajectories, while further developing meanings,
recruitment and capacity-building. This perspective recommends an epistemological shift away from the
apparent boundaries of the social movement and individual activist; to the ideas, social practices and
experiences shared by participants in movements and their social surroundings.
Problematizing the collective
There are many empirical accounts of people who together share politicized practices that are not
directly part of social movement mobilization (e.g. Purdue et al 1997; Cherry 2006; Haenfler et al 2012).
Although such practitioners may lack shared goals and collective identity, scholars have tended to use the
terminology of collectives – movements, subcultures and neotribes. Squatting, veganism, the use of local
currencies and the use of co-operative business models, for example, are ways in which social practices and
cultural codes around tenancy, food consumption, economic exchange and business organization can be re-
ordered. Their performance is often understood by participants as questioning the legitimacy of orthodoxies
or dominant cultural codes, and the practices regularly share overarching goals with social movements.
Using the terminology of collectives in these cases can obscure the relationships between more and less
politicized people, and the different ways in which the same practices can be performed. Although the
notion that social groupings overlap is now taken as given (see Maffesoli 1996), most empirical studies
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retain a collective term and use it to study one supposed collective at a time. Empirically studying the
overlapping of social constellations therefore has an untapped potential in understanding the everyday
production of social collectives through processes of recruitment and capacity-building, and the constitution
of an unfolding collective identity that is fluid (McDonald 2010), but is nevertheless patterned and
distributed in specific ways. Practices which are politically inflected are particularly interesting for showing
how movements produce and maintain political meaning.
Examples of how groupings are entangled shows how the problem persists. Punk, for instance, has
traditionally been described as a subculture, with Dick Hebdige (1979) arguing that expressions of style,
argot, music and ritual provide ‘magical solutions’ to working-class social predicaments. Following this
and the unravelling of the concept of subcultures, commentators have since focused on components of punk
lifestyles that seem to demonstrate a politics of food provisioning (veganism), and the independent and
autonomous production of music and media (DiY), as itself being a milieu or ‘culture’ (Purdue et al 1997;
McKay 1998). However, others discuss veganism as a cultural movement in itself, that punks play just one
part of (Cherry 2006). Here punk is conceived merely as a cultural style that some members of the vegan
‘movement’ adhere to. Research has also explored punks’ involvement in social movements (e.g. O’Connor
2003). These works present a contradictory array of collectives or movements on the basis of various
different social, cultural and political practices, only hinting at the variety of ways in which food habits,
cultural rituals and political protest overlap (a partial exception is Purdue et al 1997). Such overlaps are
central to patterns of cultural and political solidarity, and processes of recruitment, capacity-building and
decline in and around social movements.
Continuing in this vein, recent work has argued that apparently politicized people practising green
living, voluntary simplicity and vegetarianism should be considered social movements based around
aspects of lifestyle (Haenfler, Johnson and Jones 2012). Yet although it is reasonable that such activities be
recognized in social movement literature, the notion that they compose distinct movements plays down the
meanings and activities that they share with other social movements – obscuring their emergence, support
networks and potential mobilization. Groupings and networks, explicitly political or otherwise, are never
autonomous of one another, but share practices, ideas, and space.
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Social practices
Taking practices as the principal methodological unit of analysis rather than individuals or collectives is
one potential antidote to these problems. Focusing on what people do and why allows for a better
understanding of how ideas and politics inhere in the activities – tactical or everyday – carried out by
movements. Despite an increasing use of ‘theories of practice’ across the social sciences, influenced by
Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu and Andreas Reckwitz (2002), among others, there has been little
application in the sub-field of social movements (some notable recent exceptions explore media practices,
see for example Mattoni 2012). Examining practices allows analysis to de-centre the individual or social
collective from analysis, and articulate how social forms are continually being produced, reproduced,
disrupted and realigned. The distinction between practices as entities and performances is key here.
Routinized and coordinated bundles of activity, such as (for example) food provisioning, sheltering and
recreation, are referred to as practices as entities, a main characteristic being that they are recognizable
activities even if one is not a practitioner (Reckwitz 2002). Performances, meanwhile, refer to the instances
of practices being carried out. Practices as entities are continually constituted and reproduced through their
performances, with their meanings and compositions shifting and developing accordingly.
The persisting focus on moments of mobilization as separable from ‘latent’ cultural processes, and
on movements as neatly separated from wider socio-cultural milieux such as youth cultures or other
groupings, has survived various rounds of conceptual development. This paper thus uses theories of
practice as an epistemological device and resource for analysing everyday political processes in
movements. The following two sections introduce the case studies and methodology used to carry out this
work.
The case of social centres
Social centres are a type of ‘free space’ for the organization and interaction of social and cultural
movements, and the practice of daily life. Miguel Martínez writes:
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In them the functions of residential buildings have been integrated, subordinated or eliminated in
favour of a broad range of counter-cultural, political and productive activities open to other social
movements and sectors of the population beyond the ‘alternative scene’. (2007: 383)
Three main elements thus define social centres: they act as a base and resource for social protest; they host
a set of ‘alternative’ cultural and educational practices; and they engage with localities and local
communities via the organization of political, educational and leisure activities. They may or may not be
accompanied by a residential communal living project. These elements together differentiate social centres
from other practical movement projects in cities across Europe.
Social centres have their origins in the squatting movements of Holland, Italy, Germany and the
UK, with Spain a more recent but exceptionally active national context (see Ruggiero 2000; Martínez 2002,
2007; Chatterton 2010; Mudu 2004). In the UK, Holland and Germany, squatting as a practice became
framed politically after its use in contesting housing shortages. From the early 1970s, and particularly in
Italy, Holland and Germany, squats began to use appropriated space to address the lack of social services
and cultural infrastructure in neighbourhoods, allowing a pooling and sharing of skills and knowledge in
organizing free education and resources (Martínez 2002). Although many contemporary social centres are
not squatted, they generally originate from these public and politically varied squatting experiences.
In Spain, and Catalonia, these processes took place more rapidly following the rapid development,
fragmentation and assimilation of existing ‘new social movements’ into the political system after Franco’s
death in 1975 and the transition towards democracy (Alabart i Vila 1998; Buey 1999). In the early 1980s,
early squats in the cities of Madrid, Bilbao and Barcelona had begun to identify as multifaceted political
and counter-cultural spaces (Martínez 2007; Gonzalez 2011). Increasingly international punk bands and
‘zines’ allowed radical political perspectives around anti-fascism and autonomism to develop beyond
Germany and Italy, and take root in the Spanish context (Fernández Gómez 2010). In the Spanish context
squatting and social centres are organized by an increased variety of groups and movements (Fernández
Gómez 2010). In such a context, it has been claimed, Catalan social centres have politically socialized a
generation of activists, were organizational bases for a number of prominent counter-summits in the alter-
globalization movement, and re-popularized assembly structures, civil disobedience and direct action to a
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coalition of actors across the political left (Herreros 2004; Juris 2008; González 2011). The attempted
recent eviction of one long-standing centre, Can Vies, in 2014, led to sustained demonstrations of tens of
thousands of people despite repressive police tactics, and eventual agreement from the council to halt the
demolition and, apparently, to agree to activists’ demands to rebuild the centre (e.g. Mumbrú Escofet 2014).
This paper’s empirical work is based on participant observation and interviews focused around
three social centres in Barcelona, selected from a total of several dozen active self-described centres in the
metropolitan area. The following section briefly introduces the case studies chosen and details the methods
used for gathering data.
Fieldwork and methodology
Can Tintorer2 was a squatted former council building located on the edge of Barcelona. A relatively
unprecedented eight years in age when fieldwork began, it was a symbolically important project among
social centres, activists and participants in the alternative cultural milieu of Barcelona. It was home to
twenty-five semi-permanent residents, who organized the social centre and communal living project. Their
political interests revolved around environmental sustainability, self-sufficiency, anarchism and community
living. Residents were individually involved in various movements from local campaigns for the defence of
national park land, to international mobilizations. The social centre leased space freely in the grounds as
allotments to neighbours; ran environmental education workshops for school and university groups and
welcomed 50–150 visitors one day a week for its public events.
Localia was only several months old when fieldwork commenced, and consisted of three
collectives dating from a previous social centre, and a somewhat separated community of twenty
inhabitants. The space was located in a neighbourhood high in immigration, rapidly gentrifying through its
popularity with tourists, students and young cultural workers. A significant Latin American influence
shaped the activities and collectives that operated in the social centre’s public space, and the centre’s
overall identity. During 2009–2010, the period of data collection, Localia was among the most active
centres in Barcelona, with an average of six weekly activities organized, including theatrical, dance and
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Notes
1 Acknowledgements: This work was made possible through support from the ESRC (ES/I903445/1). Thanks to Alan Warde, Dale Southerton, Kevin Gillan, Nick Crossley and Kevin Hetherington and members of the Manchester Social Movements Research Group for feedback on early drafts and much valuable discussion, and the anonymous referees for their thoughtful comments and suggestions. Thanks most of all to the participants in the study. All errors are my own.
2 Names of all participants and social centres have been anonymized, and their details and locations perturbed in order to protect confidentiality.
3 This fieldwork took place at a time when Catalonia and Spain were in recession and youth unemployment was nearly 40% (European Commission 2012), but before the majority of public sector cuts implemented by the Catalan centre-right government, voted into parliament in November 2010. It pre-dated general elections and the indignados or 15-M movement of public square occupations of May 15th 2011 onwards by roughly a year. Many of those involved in social centres participated, and tactics popular in centres such as civil disobedience, assembly structures and a prefigurative political orientation were among the distinctive features of this dramatic and sustained surge in mobilization.